The Madness Underneath - Maureen Johnson

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one,” I said. “What about the one in the bathroom? The one Jo used on Newman?”

      He reached into his pocket and removed a small plastic vial, then he switched on the interior light so I could look at it. It contained a gray stone.

      “That’s it,” he said. “It’s gone cloudy, as you can see. It doesn’t work anymore. We’ve tried. It’s like a blown lightbulb.”

      “What about the two in the river?” I asked. “Can you get them back? You can get things out of the Thames—guns and evidence and stuff, right?”

      “Guns, maybe, on a good day. But not two extremely small stones. The Thames is a powerful tidal river. Presumably the stones drifted a bit before they sank, and now they’re mixed in somewhere in the millions of tons of sediment and sludge. So you are the only terminus. Then I saw what happened to you . . . I needed to show Thorpe that there was one terminus left. I also needed a good reason to bring you back. I was never comfortable with you being sent away like that, on your own, with no support. This solved both problems. We’ll be allowed to keep going for a while now that he’s seen.”

      Stephen was right. I couldn’t have stayed there on my own, with no one to talk to. He reached over and took the vial and put it back in his pocket.

      “And how did you do it?” I asked. “How did you bring me back?”

      “Thorpe did that. I honestly don’t know how he set it up. I only know he made a very strong suggestion to your therapist that you should be returned to London. He didn’t give me any details.”

      Of course. Now it all made sense. Julia’s sudden decision that I should return to Wexford. Her obvious lie about all the work I’d done in therapy.

      “It was up to you,” Stephen said. “You were asked if you wanted to return. You said yes.”

      “But I didn’t say I would just . . . put on some freak show for Thorpe, or blow up some woman. You could have told me where we were going.”

      “I wasn’t sure if you’d agree to just . . . doing it. But I thought if you saw the pain Diane was in . . . it was appropriate use, Rory. She was in agony. Now, I’ve told you everything. Give me back the keys. Now.”

      The keys were sweat-stuck to my chest. I knocked them loose and they fell gracefully into my crotch. I picked them up and handed them over. He started the car again and was putting it into reverse, then stopped.

      “Boo and Callum,” he said, his voice smooth and quiet again. “They know you’re back. I can take you to see them now, and we can talk about it. If you want. We can go right now, or we can do it some other time. I don’t know how you’re feeling.”

      The rapid change in emotions, the way he wasn’t looking at me . . . he was still feeling very guilty. His reasons may have been good, but he still felt bad about using me like that, about keeping things from me.

      I did want to see Boo and Callum. Truth be told, I was still glad to see Stephen. And to tell even more truth, it was just a little bit fun to play with his guilt. And he did feel guilty. And after the last few weeks, I deserved whatever fun I could get.

      “We can go now,” I said in a low voice, rubbing a clear patch in the fog on the window.

      N JUST A FEW TURNS, WE WERE HEADING TOWARD THE yellow glowing eye of the clock at the top of Big Ben. The Houses of Parliament were lit up for the night, and the London Eye loomed just across the water, a neon bluish-purple circle revolving slowly. Everything in this part of London was alight. We crossed the bridge by the Parliament buildings and headed over to the south side of the river.

      We turned past Waterloo station and onto the fairly quiet residential streets beyond. He drove down a street with a chip shop on the corner and pulled the car into the only empty space along the street and turned off the engine.

      “We have a new flat—” he began.

      “I know,” I said.

      This seemed to surprise him. He knew something about me, but I knew something about him as well.

      “Oh. Right. Well, the owner of our old flat decided it was time to start charging three thousand pounds a month again. So that was that, really. Since we did such a good job with the Ripper, Her Majesty’s Government has given us a proper office and somewhere to live. It’s just here.”

      He pointed at one of the many largely identical buildings along the road—plain brick houses in a row, the kind found all over the city. Definitely not as fancy as the old place.

      “There’s one more thing,” he said. “I told Callum and Boo there was a meeting tonight, but not what it was about. For two reasons. One, I didn’t know what would happen. It was possible that you wouldn’t go through with it or it wouldn’t work. And two, Boo. She would never have stood for it. And I couldn’t tell Callum without telling Boo. They never knew how close we were to being shut down.”

      “Sounds like you’ve been keeping a lot of secrets,” I said.

      “It goes with the job. Come on.”

      We entered a very narrow hall, stepping on a pile of mail and flyers as we passed inside. There was weird textured wallpaper in the hall, and a light that didn’t quite do the job it was meant for. It glowed down, making a puddle of light in the vestibule, but the stairs were shrouded in darkness. There was no handrail, and the carpet on the steps was slippery from being trod on too many times. I put my hands on the walls and supported myself as I went up, my fingers running over the Braille of the wallpaper. Another jingle of keys. I heard voices inside the apartment on the landing—one low, laughing. The other high-pitched and insistent. I knew that last voice very well. I had lived with that voice.

      When he opened the door and I poked my head inside, I recognized a lot of the furniture from the old flat, including the two old sofas and the unstable kitchen table with

      mismatched chairs. The other flat had been larger, so everything was crammed in, leaving barely enough room to get around. Books were piled on the floor, all along the walls, piles and piles of them in varying heights. There were also document boxes and piles of thick folders. Maps and notes were taped all over the walls, which were covered in more textured wallpaper, this time in a mustard yellow. It was particularly jarring when combined with the red Scotch plaid curtains that were drawn tightly shut over the front windows.

      A head popped over the top of the sofa, then the rest of Callum appeared as he climbed over the back of the sofa to get to me.

      “Hey!” he said. “Look who it is!”

      Callum gave me a big hug, wrapping me in his extremely impressive arm and chest muscles. Boo was on the other sofa, her leg in a cast, stretched out. Boo had been trying to protect me from the Ripper, and he had thrown her in front of a car.

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